Character data is roughly all the non-markup contents of
XML documents, including whitespace between tags. Note
that the XML parser does not add or remove any whitespace,
it is up to the application (you) to decide whether
whitespace is significant.

PHP programmers should be familiar with processing
instructions (PIs) already. <?php ?> is a processing
instruction, where php is called
the "PI target". The handling of these are
application-specific, except that all PI targets starting
with "XML" are reserved.

This handler is called when the XML parser finds a
reference to an external parsed general entity. This can
be a reference to a file or URL, for example. See the external entity
example for a demonstration.